Making the Most of Your Sessions - Advanced

At the advanced level, you can string phrases together to create longer sentences. You are beginning to offer opinions more confidently and analyze reading and listening material. Your proficiency will improve as you engage with difficult material and think critically in the target language. Your conversation sessions will help you become comfortable narrating multiple tenses, role-playing complicated scenarios, and speaking about topics of personal and public interest.

When you come to your session…

Come Well Prepared

In an advanced course, your study sources are longer and more complicated. Use the resources in your syllabus, and any outside sources you find, to challenge yourself in reading and speaking:

• When you read a dialogue or a chunk of text, read it multiple times and look up all new words. After reading, take time to voice your thoughts on the material out loud to yourself for about a minute afterwards.

For listening practice, continue using resources from your syllabus, and think about any other resource that might be available to you for more practice:

• Is there radio you can listen to online from another country?
• How about TV shows or Youtube channels?
• The more exposure you can get to both formal and colloquial speaking patterns, the better.

There should be a speaking component of every study session you have. It will be hard to gain more advanced speaking skills if you speak only once per week at your conversation sessions:

• In particular, it’s important to practice creating with the language (i.e., speaking your own thoughts and ideas instead of reading a dialogue in your book aloud). If you practice consistently during the week, you will engage more readily with your conversation partner and the topics in your session.

Come with Questions

You can now ask your conversation partner longer questions in the target language. When appropriate ask your conversation partner their thoughts and opinions on the topics you are covering.

• If you have a longer reading or listening selection, online activity, or something similar, write down some questions about it and go over them with your conversation partner. Make it a lively back-and-forth. Asking and answering questions is a great way to make yourself think on your feet and hone your conversational ability.

Push Yourself

At the advanced level, you can say a lot and understand a lot. Now is the time to ask yourself questions about the gaps in your proficiency and where you want to go from here.

• In the session, what vocabulary would make the conversation easier? What else would be helpful to know about a particular topic? When you are talking to your conversation partner and can’t find the best way to express what you want, ask them about it immediately.

The best way to continue advancing in proficiency is to speak as much as you can in your session. Challenge yourself to use the new structures and vocabulary words you’ve learned as much as possible, and keep exposing yourself to the language at every opportunity.